Archive for Adam Sandler

Okay. I liked this movie. Is that such a crime? Is my opinion no longer valid? Maybe. Maybe you liked The Descendants. A lot of people did. Including the founder of this website. And now I’m basically telling you I liked Jack and Jill.

“Which one is Jack and Jill?”

“Oh, it’s the one where Adam Sandler has a twin sister and she’s played by Adam Sandler?”

“You saw that?”

“Yeah. On a date.”

You know why I liked this movie? I’ll tell you. Because Adam Sandler played Jill, the twin sister, so well, so thoroughly, I thought of her as a woman. I was not taken out of scenes because I was thinking it was Adam Sandler in a dress and a wig. Even in scenes featuring her muscular thighs: I believed the character, full on. And I believed in her, too. I liked her, and I would have liked to talk to her. My friend (who despises the movie though he has never seen it) said it was supposed to be mean spirited towards Jill. I didn’t feel that way. I thought it was an affectionate and, more importantly, an honest portrayal of a funny, lonely, adorable woman from the nice part of the Bronx.

By the way, everything else in the movie – the male Adam Sandler character, Al Pacino, Katie Holmes, other side characters – is bad and not worth talking about.

Finally, the movie begins and ends with supposed real twins talking about what it’s like being twins. This did not sit well because a) all those couples in When Harry Met Sally… are actors, and b) because we know the whole movie is using green screens constantly, so how do we know it’s not one person multiplied?

I was in an extremely bad place when I saw Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler. No dying grandmother; no loss of job. It was just me. Desperate to be in a movie theater inhaling popcorn, it was either BS or Marley and Me and I couldn’t see Marley and Me because I had promised to see it with my ex-girlfriend. (We eventually did see it and it was bad and long and boring but this is not a Marley and Me review.) BS surprised me. I don’t want to give too much away; the ad campaign made it look like one thing and it’s not that bad – I’m referring to the magic stuff. Keri Russell isn’t that annoying as the love interest. The I’ll-never-agree-with-you-or-your-way-of-life routine with Sandler was pretty stock, but it works. A romance subplot was unavoidable; what I’m saying is it could have been a lot worse. Guy Pearce was great as the snotty hotel desk clerk – the story centers around a hotel – serving as Sandler’s nemesis. Pearce is good in this; I just wish Priscilla Queen of the Desert stood the test of time. The CGI gerbil wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I don’t know much about Russell Brand, the British comedian who looks like a stretched Robert Smith, but he was a pleasure in this: the comedic relief in a comedy. Okay I just watched the trailer and now I’m ashamed I’m writing this review. But I’ll stand by what I’ve said. See Bedtime Stories, especially, of course, if you babysit.